Race

Being the queerio I am, I have this pass time of regularly Googling queer sex related topics in the news for fun. Hey, who knows, maybe there's some new sex toy I need to learn about #possibleTMI. Well this time, I stumbled across some less-than-awesome news: black women are less likely to get HPV Vaccines than other demographics. According to new research, only 18 percent of black women from 18 to 24 have gotten the vaccine, as opposed to over 30 percent of white women.

• Umme-Hani Khan, who was fired by Abercrombie for wearing a hijab, has won her discrimination case. Abercrombie argued to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that their workers are not employees subject to regular employment law but actually "living advertisements." Nice try, jerks. [Today]

You may not have heard of hip hop producer Ebony Oshunrinde. Stop! Don't rush to Wikipedia because you feel out of touch. We often don't know the government names of many artists to whom we regularly listen and there's nothing wrong with that. What's surprising to me is that you may not have heard of Ms. Oshunrinde's nom de plume Wondagurl, either.

At just 16, this young woman has garnered production credits on Jay-Z's game-changing album "Magna Carta Holy Grail," a feat that men twice her age would gladly sell their souls to the illuminati to accomplish. Say what you want about Jigga, but producing anything for a multi-platinum recording artist is a big deal, especially if you're a woman.

I'm usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.

But ads are powerful. They're a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it's rare to see people like me—with a black father and a white mother—represented in ads.

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, "Just Checking," that featured an interracial family—a white mother, black father and their daughter—before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn't really register until I finally did see it for myself.

My grandmother was a cleaning lady for a white family that kept the fingers and toes of black people in a jar on their mantle. No, this was not slavery. This was 1940's South Carolina. When I saw Lee Daniels' The Butler, I thought of my grandmother's experience, and how one can endure and somehow withstand dehumanization on a daily basis, only to survive, and love after it all.